Random NetBeans Stuff

Sunday Sep 23, 2012

The first photo shows me controling a JavaFX chart by rotating a Tinkerforge device, while the other two are of me using code by Christian Pohl from Nordhorn, Germany, to show components from Gerrit Grunwald's SteelSeries library being externally controled by Tinkerforge devices:

What these examples show is that you can have a robot (i.e., an external device), of some kind, that can produce output that can be visualized via JavaFX charts and SteelSeries components.

For example, imagine a robot that moves around while collecting data on the current temperature throughout a building. That's possible because a temperature device is part of Tinkerforge, just like the rotating device and distance device shown in the photos above. The temperature data collected by the robot would be displayed in various ways on a computer via, for example, JavaFX charts and SteelSeries components.

From there, reports could be produced and adjustments could be made to the robot while it continues moving around collecting temperature data. The fact that Tinkerforge has Wifi support makes a scenario such as described here completely possible to implement.

And all of this can be programmed in Java, without very much work, since the Java bindings for Tinkerforge are simple to use, such as shown in yesterday's blog entry. Related to that, the next thing I want to work on is... figuring out how to deploy an application in NetBeans IDE by turning the Tinkerforge rotating device! That would be pretty cool, and very useful: just do some coding in your application, turn the rotation device, and then the application is deployed. Implementation will be simple, just integrate the NetBeans AntLogger, combined with ActionUtils, with Tinkerforge!

About

Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) is a Principal Product Manager in the Oracle Developer Tools group living & working in Amsterdam. He is a Java technology enthusiast, evangelist, trainer, speaker, and writer. He blogs here daily.

The focus of this blog is mostly on NetBeans (a development tool primarily for Java programmers), with an occasional reference to NetBeans, and sometimes diverging to topics relating to NetBeans. And then there are days when NetBeans is mentioned, just for a change.